As we enter an era in which artificial intelligence (AI) has become part of everyday life, the central themes of the world's major art museums are changing. Instead of "What shall we show?" they now focus on "With what questions shall we open the future?" This prompts reflection on what challenges Korean art truly faces.
In the AI era, contemporary art confronts two paths. One is the path of using data and algorithms as materials for art. Artists Shin Seung-back and Kim Yong-hun transform Korea's wildflowers into data, asking where a flower ends and where it ceases to be a flower. It is the moment when AI's boundaries of recognition return to the boundaries of human perception. Refik Anadol, the world-renowned AI media artist, opened Dataland, the world's first AI art museum, in Los Angeles. Oxford University's Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities in the UK is also experimenting with the combination of AI and the humanities, archives and art.
The other path is the human touch that the digital cannot replace. In Korean painting, hanji (traditional Korean paper) is the essential foundation. Korean paper, once called Goryeoji, was at one time the finest paper internationally. The long fibers of Korean paper, made by shaking it horizontally and vertically, are tough and firm, preventing ink from spreading too quickly. Just as semiconductors today turn the flow of electricity on and off, enabling calculation and memory, hanji modulated the spreading of ink, enabling the flow and memory of the mind. Korean painting is not about dazzling diffusion but about the disciplined time of slow seeping. On that surface, the artist's mind weaves between freedom and restraint.
Now that K-culture stands at the center of the world, Korean art no longer has reason to import Western theory. What is needed now is to create a single movement that encompasses the success of individual artists. Just as "Vienna 1900" became the name of an artistic movement that took place in Austria in the early 1900s, Seoul too can become an aesthetic name. Seoulism, Seoul School, or a Korean School that expresses its own meaning, is possible.
For art to succeed in the AI era, it must return to the most simple and yet most difficult fundamentals. It must reach beauty, not show off technology. Just as the Impressionist painters captured, through the new technology of the paint tube, how dazzlingly beautiful outdoor light was, today's artists must express the beauty sensed by body and mind through the new material of AI and the fundamental human touch. The final judgment still rests on human emotion. Whether it is the diamond skull of British contemporary artist Damien Hirst or the skull water of Wonhyo, the eminent monk of Silla, the question is the same. What is most precious to finite human beings?
AI has brought convenience. What humans now need is not faster and smoother production, but a semiconductor of the mind that conveys pain and conflict, memory and sensation. The future of Korean art depends on a mindset that shows, in a human way, the infinity of data and the emotion created by the human touch. Art in the AI era is ultimately the path by which humans become human again through their own unique beauty. That is the beginning of the "Korean School."
